I notice this with people talking about capitalism, obviously, but honestly what drove me to make this post is the attempted arguments against veganism. They’re basically 95% unoriginal and fail under the most basic of scrutiny.
Take, for example, “not eating the meat won’t bring the cow back.” Under basically any logical scrutiny, this is a clear double standard to any other purchasing decision in capitalist society, and doesn’t really make any sense. But I’ve seen in so many times over the years, so much so that im planning on becoming a vegan over a period of time. Not because of any arguments vegans make, but because somehow pro-meat eaters are losing a debate to a brick wall, and the conclusions I’ve made myself have convinced myself that I should be vegan. And I’m really starting to ask, do people just…like…ctrl+c ctrl+v arguments in their head?
I…try to be nice. But…how little respect to your own ability do you have if you do that? Not only to justify something you really don’t have to, but something you obviously dont care about. I mean…sorry, it’s just baffling to me.
In the words of Kim Kitsuragi from disco elysium, “I dont understand officer…please, help me understand”
They’re just pointing out the underlying logic behind the argument, and how applying that logic to other situations produces absurd conclusions. At no point did he claim the two were equivalent. In fact the whole point of the comparison is that the settler-colonialism is indisputably bad.
Let me make a similar argument to demonstrate. When I was in school, sometimes certain teachers employed or threatened collective punishment, if one person did something wrong, and no one confessed, then the whole class would be punished. Collective punishment is pretty awful and unjustifiable as a concept, like, the exact same logic behind it has been used to justify a lot of terrible war crimes, it was even used during the Holocaust, and it is explicitly prohibited by the Geneva Convention.
Now obviously, whatever punishment my class had to deal with in school is in no way comparable to the Holocaust. I don’t think it would be fair of you to get angry at me for “comparing” the two, because my point wasn’t that the scope of harm was the same, only that if we can clearly recognize that collective punishment is a horrible war crime when the stakes are high, then we’re left wondering why, in this other situation with lower stakes, would it suddenly become valid?
Likewise, we can see in the high-stakes context of settler-colonialism that if someone says, “Yes, it was bad to kick the Palestinians out of their homes, but now that it’s done I might as well move in” that logic is obviously not valid. Why then, does the logic suddenly become valid when it’s applied to the lower-stakes situation of someone saying, “Yes, it was bad to kill this animal, but since it’s already dead, I might as well eat it?”
What part of that reasoning do you take issue with? What part of that “makes vegans look ridiculous” or makes you want to say something rude?